After the public release of KDE 3.1 it was only a matter of time to see a Knoppix based Live CD using this version. The KDE Promo team worked on several custom versions, one of which was then used at Solutions Linux in Paris. The forum for Knoppix customizations, Knoppix.net, then went ahead and offered a custom Knoppix KDE edition containing KDE 3.1 and many more KDE applications. Vinod Kumar, one of the editors of Ammai.com and also a Microsoft Certified Professional in VB 6.0 Desktop Applications, chose the above mentioned Knoppix KDE edition for trying Linux for the first time ever. He gives 4.5 out of 5 and concludes: "Being the first time I used Linux, I was highly satisfied. (...) the entire experience was wonderful. (...) What is even more amazing is that because of Knoppix, Linux is closer to anyone who wants to try it risk-free. I plan on using Knoppix more and more until I get completely familiar with it, then I will most likely install Linux on my hard drive."

Comments

here are some nice hinds:
1. getting the processcontrol quicker: just hit: ctrl+esc
2. or kill and application: ctrl-alt-esc and klick (right klick kills the skull) ;-)
3. in konquror try out the splitt windows it rocks
4. or do an fish://users@yourdomain u can even do it in quanta: loading up with full encryption (ssl). best with splitt windows (u need an ssl shell for that)
5. or do tabbed browsing with konquorer (shift+ctr+n or so...)
6. or do shift+up/down arrow in konqueror....

...
7. type in konquorer: gg:knoppix or php:session
8. right click at panel -> add -> applet -> public webserver ...gooo (or some other applet)
9. click at the clock (at the right)
10. run an application (kwrite) as root? alt+F2 and then kdesu kwrite

Everbody speaks so well of fish:// , but KDE has had sftp:// since longer. It uses the SFTP protocol which is implemented in (almost) all SSH v2-implementations (in the default installs of GNU lsh, OpenSSH and SSH.com) and, abobe all, properly standardized. So prefer sftp:// if it is available on your systems!

I always thought 'fish' and 'sftp' were pretty much synonymous... but then,
what do I know? Isn't fish using the SSH protocol as well? If not, where are the
differences? I think many KDE users (not just me) would like to know...

fish works even on systems that don't allow or can't do sftp (crazy admins, old ssh, etc). otherwise they're pretty much the same functionality wise. fish puts a perl script in your home dir (.fishsrv.pl), while sftp doesn't require that. instead it requires a ssh2 server that has sftp support turned on.

Additionally, or, more precise, because of these differences, in my experience sftp has a much better performance on low-end servers and does not load their CPU that much.

In contrast an advantage of fish is that it does support symlinks transparently while sftp does not, at least not with my current server configuration which is pretty much Debian Woody default concerning the sshd.

That's really neat! The only problem I have is that it takes a considerable
amount of hand-eye coordination to stop the text from scrolling once you've got
it started! Or is there a convenient trick to do so?

Ahh, that makes this feature almost usable again. But still: shortly after the feature was introduced, kthml reacted promptly when I de-/accelerated the autoscroll speed via subsequent
shift-cur-up/down hits. This got broken somewhen, and now there are several seconds long lags that pretty much defeat the purpose of autoscrolling. I do not use it much since then. (No, I didn't file a bug report yet. :-)

this weeks edition of the german computermagazin c't ships with a knoppix CD including KDE3.0.4 and OpenOffice. ( www.heise.de/ct )
Their aim is that the readers can make up there own mind wether Linux is ready for the desktop or not.

The c't is one of the best selling computer magazins in germany with over 380000 reader per issue.

I think this is a great boost for Linux and KDE.
The Knoppix guys did a really good job!

Fanboism? Maybe you should give up coining new and more annoying words?

> I have been using linux since the beginning. Who has six months to compile a basic system?

We're talking since the first kernel appeared? I guess you would have been compiling it then. Six months for a basic system? Talk about FUD! I've installed Gentoo on several systems now and love it. It is not for the faint of heart but compared to the packaged distros I've used it is very light, extremely fast and totally honors the developer's design. I also don't have to stick a CD in the drive to update ever again, have preemptible multi-tasking on my system and never have to deal with RPM dependency hell again. I've also gotten programs running on my system that would not install with RPM or build from source on other distros. I find XFree86 upgrades to be cake and can get the latest PHP installed with ease. There is a lot to be said for Gentoo... not the least ot which is that it returns to the *source* part of open source.

For all this I got each basic system up with X and KDE in a matter of hours because of the new option to have large programs prebuilt A full rebuild of KDE along with X, a new gcc, base system files and other programs took a day and a half on my wife's Athlon 700 with 256 MB of RAM. It's much faster on my 1900+ with 500 MB. I have not even started using distcc because of optimizations.

BTW the best part of my wife's update is that she did it because she can type "emerge -u world". Want to talk about how many clinics we can find on how to do this with RPM? Have you ever killed RPM? I don't know where your "beginning" was with Linux but it does not appear to be very tolerant or informed. If you have broadband and a reasonably new system Gentoo can be very attractive as well as save you time and anxiety over 2-4 upgrades a year. For a growing number of people this is something to get excited about.

APT lets users not have to worry about dependencies and not have to waste bandwidth and CPU cycles to download and build from source. It also lets one build from source the packages for which that is absolutely necessary. At the moment, it seems like a far more reasonable tool for most users.

"APT lets users not have to worry about dependencies and not have to waste bandwidth and CPU cycles to download and build from source."

Gentoo takes care of dependencies. And you dont seem to understand: Gentoo-users don't use Gentoo despite the compiling. Many do it BECAUSE of the compiling. I prefer to compile my software from source.

Besides, Gentoo is alot more up-to-date that Debian is (Xfree 4.2 was only 9 months late in Debian, KDE3 is still not in Sid).

It is? To be honest, I haven't checked recently since I'm using Gentoo more and more. You could say that KDE3's absence from Debian was one thing that drove me to Gentoo. If they FINALLY have KDE3 in Sid, good for them! Too bad they are about half a year late!

How can they be a year and a half late, when kde3.1
just came out a month ago?

Debian has had all the rcs of kde 3.1 all along.
They weren't in sid ,but in packages that were in
auxillary package repositories.
Although they are called unofficial packages , they
were by the debian kde packagers themselves.
You just had to add the new location to your sources.list.

Debian for the most part, can be as uptodate as you want it to.

As for Gentoo, I have nothing against it, ( tried it once) but
emerges don't always work either.

> APT lets users not have to worry about dependencies and not have to waste bandwidth and CPU cycles to download and build from source.

I know about APT, though I have not used it. Conversely it is possible to retrieve prebuilt programs thorugh Portage too. I used it for Open Office after I read about the resourses a compile hogged. However the argument about CPU cycles is specious. Most people are hardly ever using any of their CPU unless they are compiling or rendering. I leave my system on at night and I sure don't notice the difference. What I do notice is the blazing speed compiling with CFLAGS="-march=athlon-xp -pipe -O3". I've heard that Debian was a faster distro. When I first loaded Gentoo it was several orders of magnitude faster than I had been with the same system running Mandrake. I also like being up to date with the latest gcc.

> It also lets one build from source the packages for which that is absolutely necessary. Again, it is "open source" not "free binaries". ;-)

The Gentoo perspective is just the reverse... installing pre-compiled programs when absolutely necessary.

> At the moment, it seems like a far more reasonable tool for most users.

I've had people write me with user questions that were running Gentoo where the questions made me wonder how much they knew about basic Linux. Conversely I've heard that initial install on Debian is not nearly as easy as Mandrake and SuSE. For the moment I'd say neither distro is near so ready for the average computer user and Knoppix is the clear winner for painless review. (granted it's from Debian but that's not the point is it.)

If I had to bet between Debian and Gentoo which one would capture the hearts of more people computing in the next few years I'd say the momentum goes to Gentoo and the advances they're making are impressive. As broadband connections and faster CPUs proliferate the adventurous are migrating en masse to Gentoo. Nothing against Debian because it's a very good distro but Gentoo is a remarkable success story with a lot of momentum that strikes a chord with many users tired of RPM. I'd run either before tying myself to another RPM based distro. RPM could have been good but it has become a disaster. I could go on and on about how and why I dislike it.

>A full rebuild of KDE along with X, a new gcc, base system files and other
>programs took a day and a half on my wife's Athlon 700 with 256 MB of RAM.

Sometimes I wonder where the advantage of Linux - to run fast on older hardware - has gone. KDE needs lot of ressources, compiling it on AMD K6 based systems takes ages.
Would be nice if the developer would sometimes remember people with smaller ressources and try to optimize their applications instead of overboarding them with features which cannot be switched off to work with acceptabe speed on older PCs.

Sorry, but if compiling takes ages on your machine then you should install binaries instead of compiling yourself.
Furthermore, additionally to adding new features (which you, the users, ask for) we are always trying to optimize our applications. Most features which cost a lot of cpu cycles can be switched off.

>> Sometimes I wonder where the advantage of Linux - to run fast on older hardware - has gone.
>> KDE needs lot of ressources, compiling it on AMD K6 based systems takes ages.

Of course compiling takes ages! It's a lot of high quality code!

As for the speed, KDE 3.1 is Fast. Faster than 2.2.2 even, and I installed it on my P150 mhz laptop, assuming it would choke and die. But it runs, not like lightening, but quite fast, and very useable.

>> Would be nice if the developer would sometimes remember people with smaller ressources
>> and try to optimize their applications instead of overboarding them with features which cannot
>> be switched off to work with acceptabe speed on older PCs.

I think they have with kde.3 1...
as with gentoo, there is no advange to apt, if you want easy updates, getting things installed easyly there is apt. If you really want to compile kde there is konstruct, however, compiling KDE is no trivial matter, I used the great app konstruct, but still didn't manage to compile all parts of kde.

Please, please... I like Gentoo (I'm running it on the machine I use to type this) but please stop being the fanboy. apt has a much more advanced dependency scheme than Portage. (Ever tried upgrading OpenSSL to latest unstable on your Gentoo box? Guess that's why it isn't upgraded by default yet...)

apt is easily the best tool around -- for installing binaries, and no good at all for auto-compiling source packages which Portage is very good at. Use the best tool for the best job!

The Debian project rocks but is slow-moving. The Gentoo project is more dynamic, less chatter and more bleeding-edge. But they have much fewer packages and less mature tools.

A great deal of the Debian community are a bunch of stuck up *&!!# who think the are l33t just because they use Debian GNU/Linux. I used Debian on my old PC for a while, but when I bought a new one I figured it was time for a change (+ I was too lazy to do research to get Debian running on my new PC). I have to say I like Gentoo much more than I like Debian. It's like Gentoo folks are much nicer and more willing to help. Indeed Gentoo has fewer packages, but Gentoo is very new. Anyway when Debian "ruled" it was state of the art, now... Well let's hope they come up with someting revolutionary fast.

Any distribution has pros and cons, and they all should keep their focus on delivering an OS that serves the purpose. Debian is a self-indulging community that delivers in three flavours: stable, testing and unstable, being buzz words for "very obsolete", "obsolete" and "unusable". At this time, an up-to-date gnu/linux ought to include the following major projects:

Xfree 4.5
xpdf 3
teTeX 3
OpenOffice 2
PostgreSQL 8
mozilla's firefox and thunderbird 1.0.2
- support the wxwindows development libraries!!!
- use postscript and open-type fonts only (have you ever seen how good KDE looks with commercial postscript fonts? If you do, you will understand what I am saying.)

In addition to them, there should be a new collaborative project to make a live iso image, regardless of the specific flavour of linux distribution. Enough with clutter installations: just flip in the DVD, reboot and get productive. If you want, you can install the system in the hard disk and be happier. This is what I would like to have, here and now, but unable to find anywhere.

For each sinner that invokes jesus using some combination options -p (pray) -c (confess) and -b (bleef) with argument [soul], jesus performs an audit of all flags and scrubs all set sin flags. Note: jesus rarely sends to stndout, and only usually gives indirect evidence it has done anything.

DIAGNOSTICS

Extremely hard to debug using strace as jesus code is extremely well optimized for speed of execution.

My early days were not that early as to be playing with early kernels and such, but were early like Yggdrasil-Linux-CD early.

Anyhoo. I have installed Gentoo on a G4 workstation at work. it took quite a long time. A week, and that is no FUD :)

I appreciate the flexibility of which you speak, and boy am I craving it. But I also like a workstation that works. One that I dont have to fuss with, as those days are kinda over for me. Call it laziness, age, or being plain spoiled. Who knows?

I dont mind messing around. And truth be told, I found Gentoo pretty easy and straightforward to get install. Much like the ease of Slackware.

I am tempted to try gentoo on my p4 as my woes with redhats messing with kde (KDEDIR? Whats that?) are about through.

So these are my two questions:

One: I hear a lot of people end up breaking things with updates. That portage sometimes causes more problems then its worth. Simple updates can smoke something working a short time back. Witness on the forums the issue with the updated kdelibs for 3.1.

Do you have that experience? Have you had that? Is this just people who are update happy?

Also, Fonts. I want nice fonts. Know any good toots on getting smooth, pretty fonts going? Thats another common complaint on the gentoo forums. I have some tricks I have learned over the years, but frankly, I do want it to just work. so I can work.

Again. Sorry for being the ass. Thanks for calling me on it. I am quitting smoking.

Six months? Are you running Linux on old 386 :)? I'm currently running Gentoo on an old 266MHz P2-laptop (it's either 233 or 266Mhz, I'm not sure) with 128megs of RAM. It's definitely NOT state of the art.

I started the installation one evening (from State 1, which means that EVERYTHING is compiled). I reached bootstrap-phase (where it compiles GCC and Glibc) in that evening. I left it compiling and went to bed.

When I woke up, it was finished. I then progressed to next stage (when it compiles everything else). I left it compiling and went to work.

When I got back home, it was finished. I then installed Xfree and Fluxbox (the machine is short on resources, so Fluxbox was the best choice). I left it compiling (Xfree is big) and by next morning it was finished. I really didn't lose any time (since the machine was compiling in times when I wouldn't be using machine in the first place).

I would say that on a modern machine, compiling the basic system takes maybe 2-3 hours. And besides, people who use Gentoo, know about the compiling. It's not like they use Gentoo despite the compiling, thy use Gentoo BECAUSE of the compiling (of course, there are other benefits as well).

This c't edition has a much, much better setup than any other distribution I have seen so far: e.g. type ifconfig and hit and you get the list of possible devices...
Why can't every distri configure the bash like the c't guys did?

Debian/unstable already has this feature:
Type "mount " and you get the list of moutable devices (or mount points)
They even configured bash to do completion for apt:
Type "apt-get i" then "install" appears; then type kernel-i and you get alist of all the available kernel-image packages. Of course this work for every deebian package.
Even for ssh/scp:
Type ssh a and you get a list of all hostnames beginning with a